The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and her team face growing criticism of the controversial EU-US tariff deal agreed in July. I am hoping for similar calls for accountability over the EU’s complicity in Israel’s unfolding genocide in Gaza. Such a reckoning is long overdue.

I have watched in despair for almost two years as European governments have done little or nothing while Israel has devastated Gaza through bombings, targeted strikes and forced starvation after the 7 October attack by Hamas. There are so many sanctions at the EU’s disposal which they are still refusing to deploy; so many levers they are refusing to pull. The bloc is Israel’s biggest trading partner, accounting for 32% of Israel’s total trade in 2024. Yet at every meeting, EU leaders and foreign ministers have failed to secure the majority needed to suspend the EU-Israel association agreement. This despite pressure from Spain, Ireland and Slovenia, and despite the fact the EU’s own human rights experts have indicated that Israel is in breach of the accord’s human rights obligations.

Even a modest commission proposal to partly suspend Israel from the EU’s €95bn Horizon Europe research programme – an initiative that the EU’s former foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has described as a “bad joke”, given the scale of Israel’s atrocities – remains blocked by Germany and Italy. Israeli exports to the EU actually rose in early 2024. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, says Berlin is

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